When I first started talking to ISIS propagandists and supporters, I was much impressed by one of their favorite Koranic verses: “We have already created man and know what his soul whispers to him, and We are closer to him than [his] jugular vein.” The verse is a reminder of God’s omnipresence, and his Santa Claus-like awareness of our deepest selves, our sins, and our good deeds. In time, I came to associate that unsettling proximity (He is closer than you think) not only with God, but also with ISIS. They too were less distant than they seemed. What seemed at first like a movement of barbarians with alien origins and impulses looked increasingly like a human phenomenon, with human flaws and virtues (mostly flaws). The more I investigated the group’s supporters, the more I found people who at one point had shared my culture and community, even if they tried to throw it all away in the service of something wicked. In the end I discovered that one of the most important figures in the Islamic State, a mysterious ideologue named Yahya Abu Hassan, was not Syrian or Iraqi at all, but a 33-year-old American, a dope-smoking theological prodigy from my own hometown.

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The executive order President Donald Trump is expected to sign on immigration and refugees promises, according to a draft that leaked Wednesday, to suspend for 30 days the issuance of visas to citizens of a short list of scary-sounding “countries of particular concern,” likely including Yemen, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia, and Sudan. Conspicuously absent from this list are the countries whose nationals have actually perpetrated the most ghastly attacks on Western targets, and on some non-Western ones. Nearly all the attackers in Paris in November 2015 and Brussels in March 2016 carried European passports. The ringleader of the attack on diners at the Holey Artisan Bakery in Bangladesh in July of 2016 was a Canadian citizen, and the attackers all Bangladeshi. The San Bernardino shooters were an American man and his Pakistani wife, and the Orlando shooter Omar Mateen a native-born American of Afghan descent. The ISIS sympathizers to whom I spoke in researching my book, The Way of the Strangers, were European, British, Japanese, Egyptian, and American. These foreign members of the group differ from the Iraqis and Syrians in the intensity and form of their zeal. They often viewed Iraqis and Syrians as good people—but in need of theological correction and radicalization.

The Trump administration is right to treat the threat as a global one, but characteristically fact-resistant in its imagining that visa-seeking nationals of the “particular concern” countries listed above are the most likely perpetrators of slaughter in the name of the Islamic State. A global threat is a global threat, and Europeans and Americans are still part of planet Earth. If the Islamic State intends to kill Americans by sending an Iraqi or Syrian to get a visa, they are doing it the hard way. Most of the attackers will blow themselves up out of frustration with the American immigration bureaucracy before they can ever reach American shores to blow themselves up near their intended targets.

Compare the tedious process of applying for a visa to the ease with which a citizen of a visa-waiver country can buy a ticket on Air France or British Airways—or just stay home and rent a truck, or buy a kitchen knife or a jerrycan of gas and a matchbook. The whole process can be conceived and executed with a credit card, in less than a day. According to Seamus Hughes of George Washington University, slightly fewer than 120 Americans have been caught on the road to jihad, and another 52 are known to have made it to Syria. One assumes there are more waiting for their moment. Add to that number the thousands who follow ISIS in Europe, Australia, and friendly countries in the Middle East. For ISIS to choose a Syrian or Yemeni to attack a Western target is not inconceivable, but it would present needless obstacles—and ISIS wants easy wins, rather than complicated plots with high risk of failure.

The president is within his rights to implement this policy. But it is coldhearted folly.

Meanwhile, the losers in this process are the citizens of the suspect countries whose plans to come to United States for business, study, family reunification, and refuge are now suspended. None of these people has a right to come to the United States (although asylum-seekers do have a right not to be repatriated to a place of likely persecution), and the president is within his rights to implement this policy. But it is coldhearted folly. Whatever dangers visitors to the United States bring—and by any standard they should be minimal—will be outweighed by the benefits.

The draft executive order sounds compassionate notes. They are often off-key. It commands the State Department to revamp the refugee program to prioritize immigration “on the basis of religious-based persecution,” with the stipulation that the religion be a minority religion in one's home country. The obvious purpose of this order is to welcome non-Muslims victimized by ISIS in Syria and Iraq, such as the Chaldean Catholics of the Nineveh Plain, or Armenian Orthodox Syrians, or the Yezidis. But I await the first applications from Muslim minorities who allege persecution in their home countries. Would Sunnism qualify as a persecuted minority religion in Shia-dominated Iraq? Could radical Shia claim persecution by the Sunni monarchy of Bahrain? Can Ahmadi Muslims, mistreated by majorities all over the Muslim world, now cut to the front of the immigration line?

Perhaps the most important of these compassionate notes is the draft executive order’s sixth section, pertaining to the “establishment of safe zones to protect vulnerable Syrian populations.” To anyone who has paid attention to Syria for the last three years, the phrase “vulnerable Syrian populations” will sound like a sick joke: Most of the country has been a kill-zone for some time now, and the areas of superficial safety are safe only because President Bashar al-Assad has retaken them, mercilessly. The section goes on to direct the State Department to come up with a plan for “safe areas in Syria or the surrounding region” in which to kennel the millions of “vulnerable” people.

Safe zones need to be secured by force, or those within them become targets for mass killing: a turkey-shoot for genocidaires. So to establish them will require either unexpected generosity on the part of some unnamed regional government, or the establishment of an American protectorate in Syria.

If that is indeed the plan—invasion and administration of a portion of Syria—then the single paragraph devoted to the subject in this draft is a buried hint that the Trump administration is ready for an overseas military adventure beyond anything countenanced by the Obama administration, or by Trump himself. Either that, or it is a hint that the new administration has no idea how complicated Syria, refugee issues, and terrorism really are. Given the haphazardness of the rest of the new administration’s policies, and callous irrationality of the rest of this order, I find it hard to speculate on which interpretation is more likely right.

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Five days after Hurricane Maria made landfall in Puerto Rico, its devastating impact is becoming clearer.

Five days after Hurricane Maria made landfall in Puerto Rico, its devastating impact is becoming clearer. Most of the U.S. territory currently has no electricity or running water, fewer than 250 of the island’s 1,600 cellphone towers are operational, and damaged ports, roads, and airports are slowing the arrival and transport of aid. Communication has been severely limited and some remote towns are only now being contacted. Jenniffer Gonzalez, the Resident Commissioner of Puerto Rico, told the Associated Press that Hurricane Maria has set the island back decades.

A small group of programmers wants to change how we code—before catastrophe strikes.

There were six hours during the night of April 10, 2014, when the entire population of Washington State had no 911 service. People who called for help got a busy signal. One Seattle woman dialed 911 at least 37 times while a stranger was trying to break into her house. When he finally crawled into her living room through a window, she picked up a kitchen knife. The man fled.

The 911 outage, at the time the largest ever reported, was traced to software running on a server in Englewood, Colorado. Operated by a systems provider named Intrado, the server kept a running counter of how many calls it had routed to 911 dispatchers around the country. Intrado programmers had set a threshold for how high the counter could go. They picked a number in the millions.

The greatest threats to free speech in America come from the state, not from activists on college campuses.

The American left is waging war on free speech. That’s the consensus from center-left to far right; even Nazis and white supremacists seek to wave the First Amendment like a bloody shirt. But the greatest contemporary threat to free speech comes not from antifa radicals or campus leftists, but from a president prepared to use the power and authority of government to chill or suppress controversial speech, and the political movement that put him in office, and now applauds and extends his efforts.

The most frequently cited examples of the left-wing war on free speech are the protests against right-wing speakers that occur on elite college campuses, some of which have turned violent.New York’s Jonathan Chait has described the protests as a “war on the liberal mind” and the “manifestation of a serious ideological challenge to liberalism—less serious than the threat from the right, but equally necessary to defeat.” Most right-wing critiques fail to make such ideological distinctions, and are far more apocalyptic—some have unironically proposed state laws that define how universities are and are not allowed to govern themselves in the name of defending free speech.

A growing body of research debunks the idea that school quality is the main determinant of economic mobility.

One of the most commonly taught stories American schoolchildren learn is that of Ragged Dick, Horatio Alger’s 19th-century tale of a poor, ambitious teenaged boy in New York City who works hard and eventually secures himself a respectable, middle-class life. This “rags to riches” tale embodies one of America’s most sacred narratives: that no matter who you are, what your parents do, or where you grow up, with enough education and hard work, you too can rise the economic ladder.

A body of research has since emerged to challenge this national story, casting the United States not as a meritocracy but as a country where castes are reinforced by factors like the race of one’s childhood neighbors and how unequally income is distributed throughout society. One such study was published in 2014, by a team of economists led by Stanford’s Raj Chetty. After analyzing federal income tax records for millions of Americans, and studying, for the first time, the direct relationship between a child’s earnings and that of their parents, they determined that the chances of a child growing up at the bottom of the national income distribution to ever one day reach the top actually varies greatly by geography. For example, they found that a poor child raised in San Jose, or Salt Lake City, has a much greater chance of reaching the top than a poor child raised in Baltimore, or Charlotte. They couldn’t say exactly why, but they concluded that five correlated factors—segregation, family structure, income inequality, local school quality, and social capital—were likely to make a difference. Their conclusion: America is land of opportunity for some. For others, much less so.

One hundred years ago, a retail giant that shipped millions of products by mail moved swiftly into the brick-and-mortar business, changing it forever. Is that happening again?

Amazon comes to conquer brick-and-mortar retail, not to bury it. In the last two years, the company has opened 11 physical bookstores. This summer, it bought Whole Foods and its 400 grocery locations. And last week, the company announced a partnership with Kohl’s to allow returns at the physical retailer’s stores.

Why is Amazon looking more and more like an old-fashioned retailer? The company’s do-it-all corporate strategy adheres to a familiar playbook—that of Sears, Roebuck & Company. Sears might seem like a zombie today, but it’s easy to forget how transformative the company was exactly 100 years ago, when it, too, was capitalizing on a mail-to-consumer business to establish a physical retail presence.

The foundation of Donald Trump’s presidency is the negation of Barack Obama’s legacy.

It is insufficient to statethe obvious of Donald Trump: that he is a white man who would not be president were it not for this fact. With one immediate exception, Trump’s predecessors made their way to high office through the passive power of whiteness—that bloody heirloom which cannot ensure mastery of all events but can conjure a tailwind for most of them. Land theft and human plunder cleared the grounds for Trump’s forefathers and barred others from it. Once upon the field, these men became soldiers, statesmen, and scholars; held court in Paris; presided at Princeton; advanced into the Wilderness and then into the White House. Their individual triumphs made this exclusive party seem above America’s founding sins, and it was forgotten that the former was in fact bound to the latter, that all their victories had transpired on cleared grounds. No such elegant detachment can be attributed to Donald Trump—a president who, more than any other, has made the awful inheritance explicit.

National Geographic Magazine has opened its annual photo contest, with the deadline for submissions coming up on November 17.

National Geographic Magazine has opened its annual photo contest for 2017, with the deadline for submissions coming up on November 17. The Grand Prize Winner will receive $10,000 (USD), publication in National Geographic Magazine and a feature on National Geographic’s Instagram account. The folks at National Geographic were, once more, kind enough to let me choose among the contest entries so far for display here. The captions below were written by the individual photographers, and lightly edited for style.

What the Trump administration has been threatening is not a “preemptive strike.”

Donald Trump lies so frequently and so brazenly that it’s easy to forget that there are political untruths he did not invent. Sometimes, he builds on falsehoods that predated his election, and that enjoy currency among the very institutions that generally restrain his power.

That’s the case in the debate over North Korea. On Monday, The New York Timesdeclared that “the United States has repeatedly suggested in recent months” that it “could threaten pre-emptive military action” against North Korea. On Sunday, The Washington Post—after asking Americans whether they would “support or oppose the U.S. bombing North Korean military targets” in order “to get North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons”—announced that “Two-thirds of Americans oppose launching a preemptive military strike.” Citing the Post’s findings, The New York Times the same day reported that Americans are “deeply opposed to the kind of pre-emptive military strike” that Trump “has seemed eager to threaten.”

More comfortable online than out partying, post-Millennials are safer, physically, than adolescents have ever been. But they’re on the brink of a mental-health crisis.

One day last summer, around noon, I called Athena, a 13-year-old who lives in Houston, Texas. She answered her phone—she’s had an iPhone since she was 11—sounding as if she’d just woken up. We chatted about her favorite songs and TV shows, and I asked her what she likes to do with her friends. “We go to the mall,” she said. “Do your parents drop you off?,” I asked, recalling my own middle-school days, in the 1980s, when I’d enjoy a few parent-free hours shopping with my friends. “No—I go with my family,” she replied. “We’ll go with my mom and brothers and walk a little behind them. I just have to tell my mom where we’re going. I have to check in every hour or every 30 minutes.”

Those mall trips are infrequent—about once a month. More often, Athena and her friends spend time together on their phones, unchaperoned. Unlike the teens of my generation, who might have spent an evening tying up the family landline with gossip, they talk on Snapchat, the smartphone app that allows users to send pictures and videos that quickly disappear. They make sure to keep up their Snapstreaks, which show how many days in a row they have Snapchatted with each other. Sometimes they save screenshots of particularly ridiculous pictures of friends. “It’s good blackmail,” Athena said. (Because she’s a minor, I’m not using her real name.) She told me she’d spent most of the summer hanging out alone in her room with her phone. That’s just the way her generation is, she said. “We didn’t have a choice to know any life without iPads or iPhones. I think we like our phones more than we like actual people.”

Senators Lindsey Graham and Bill Cassidy sparred with Bernie Sanders and Amy Klobuchar on CNN hours after their bill dismantling Obamacare appeared to collapse.

Ordinarily, you debate to stave off defeat. But for Senators Lindsey Graham and Bill Cassidy on Monday night, the defeat came first.

By the time the two GOP senators stepped on CNN’s stage Monday night for a prime-time debate over their health-care proposal, they knew they had already lost.

A few hours earlier, Senator Susan Collins became the third Republican to formally reject the pair’s legislation to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, effectively killing its chances for passage through the Senate this week. Graham and Cassidy had hoped to use the forum to make a closing argument for their plan, and to line it up against Senator Bernie Sanders and his call for a single-payer, “Medicare-for-All” health-care system. Instead, the two senators found themselves defending a proposal that was no less hypothetical—and probably much less popular—than Sanders’s supposed liberal fantasy.